Allison Jackson Foy, a 34-year-old White/Caucasian female, was living in Wilmington, North Carolina, when she vanished after a night out in late July 2006. She had moved to the area with her husband and two daughters, and online accounts describe her as a mother who had recently found work as an assistant manager at a hotel. On the night she disappeared, she went to Junction Pub and Billiards on Carolina Beach Road with a friend. Near closing time, around 2:00 a.m.
on July 30, she was ready to go home, and a bartender reportedly called a cab for her. Allison left the bar, but she never made it home. Her car remained in the pub parking lot, and her family quickly grew alarmed when she could not be reached.
At first, the case was treated as a disappearance, and Allison's relatives pushed hard for answers. Her sister, Lisa Valentino, later said the family struggled to get the case taken seriously in the early days, believing investigators initially considered the possibility that Allison had left voluntarily or had disappeared because of drug-related issues. But Allison's family never accepted that explanation. They searched, advocated, and kept her name in public view while months turned into nearly two years with no sign of her.
The search ended in April 2008, when human remains were discovered in a wooded area or ditch off Carolina Beach Road near the Monkey Junction area of Wilmington. The discovery was grim not only because Allison had been found, but because investigators located a second set of remains nearby. The second victim was later identified as Angela Nobles Rothen, another woman who had disappeared from the Wilmington area in June 2007. Allison's remains were identified months after the discovery, and the case shifted fully into a homicide investigation. Reports have stated that Allison had been stabbed many times, while Angela Rothen also suffered fatal violence, including a knife wound. The placement of their bodies in the same general area led investigators and the families to believe the two murders were connected.
A central person of interest in the case has long been Timothy Craig Iannone, a Wilmington-area cab driver. Reports say Iannone frequented Junction Pub and Billiards, the bar where Allison was last seen, and matched descriptions connected to the cab ride Allison was believed to have taken that morning. Some accounts state that police determined Iannone gave his phone number to local bars and restaurants so people could call him when they needed a ride. The theory that has followed the case for years is that Allison left the pub with someone she believed was there to drive her home, and that she was killed after getting into that vehicle.
Investigators searched Iannone's home, vehicles, former residence, and cabs he may have driven around the time of the murders, but no charges were brought against him in Allison's case. He denied involvement in the deaths of Allison Foy and Angela Rothen. At one point, police publicly indicated he was no longer a suspect, while later reports continued to identify him as a person of interest or suspect in the connected homicide investigation. Allison's family, particularly her sister Lisa, has continued to say they believe he is tied to what happened, but the case has never resulted in murder charges.
Iannone was later prosecuted in an unrelated cold case involving the 1996 kidnapping and rape of another woman. That case moved forward after DNA testing connected him to the assault decades later. He was convicted and, in 2022, received a sentence reported as nearly 50 years in prison, effectively ensuring he would likely spend the rest of his life incarcerated. During coverage of that conviction, local reporting noted that he had also been considered a suspect in Allison's murder, but that no one had been charged in her death.
As of the most recent online reports, the murders of Allison Jackson Foy and Angela Nobles Rothen remain unsolved. No one has been arrested, charged, tried, or convicted for killing Allison. Her family has continued to seek justice, returning attention to the case on anniversaries and urging anyone with information to contact Wilmington police. The case remains a painful cold case in Wilmington: a mother who left a bar expecting a ride home, disappeared into the early morning darkness, and was found nearly two years later beside another murdered woman, with the person long associated with suspicion in the case imprisoned for a different violent crime but never formally held accountable for Allison's death.
